XAT Entrance Exam - Preparation Tips

Xaviers’ Aptitude Test-XAT is an annual examination organised by XLRI, for the admissions to various Management courses offered by various institutions under its affiliation. Preparation for XAT is much different from CAT examination in the respect of General Knowledge part and the level of difficulties in the overall paper. Moreover, XAt is conducted on the 1^st Sunday of the year.

Aspirants looking forward for XAT preparation can take help of various previous year question papers including detailed idea of the examination pattern and could go through mock XAT tests. Before going to the section wise planning for XAT, let's assess the changes in XAT paper over the last few years. 2018 onwards XAT test will be an internet based Online Format.

XAT Preparation Strategy

The paper can be fragmented into 3 parts:

1. Concept driven-

• There is Quantitative Techniques & Data Interpretation and selected areas of Reading Comprehension, clarity of basic concepts and General English that comes under the concept driven segment.

1. Practice intensive-

• Analytical Reasoning and decision making is totally related to the practice intensive section.
• For this segment we advise the aspirants to practise past question papers that could pose the direct impact on the up-coming XAT questions.

1. Environment sensitive-

• Awareness about the daily and general topics is covered under this environment sensitive section.

The XAT test is different from other MBA entrance test with respect to Decision Making section that checks the management techniques for different cases presented with a correct solution to the business situation.

XAT Preparation Tips-

XAT entrance test is a 3.5 hours paper-based test. Time allocation for Paper-1 is 2hours and 50 minutes. Afterwards students have 5mins break and then time for Papaer-2 is 35 minutes. Thus, the understanding of preparation for XAT exam is most important. Let’s first go through few tips which are covered in XAT examination, individually on each topic.

Topics covered in XAT are-

Quantitative Capability, Data Interpretation-(27 questions, 1 mark for each)

This section contains mainly concept driven and arithmetic related questions. The subjects under it are geometry, number systems, permutation and combinations, probability and functions. This part needs focus on critical reasoning skills.

Students also need to practise reading and comprehension skills. The questions asked in data interpretation are not as tough as asked in CAT examination.

Decision Making and Analytic Reasoning- (21 questions, 1 mark for each)

This part is the most unique part of the XAT examination. It mainly involves various business situations handling in the form of gain or loss with the answer provided by you. It further includes ethical difficulties; various financial problems in sales, earnings of any given organization, their employee management matters and general management frameworks. Thus, students must reply in a manner that their answer should not be based on single fact with objective focused approach. A perfect approach to such questions helps scoring good marks in this section.

Verbal and logical reasoning-(24 questions, 1 mark for each)

This section is based on reading comprehensions. Thus we advise students to check various last year papers for practise. Students can also go for mock test for the better performance.

General Knowledge-(25 questions, 1 mark for each with no negative marks for this part only)

The General Knowledge syllabus mostly consists of Current Issues, various leading brands, static GK, business general knowledge, Economics, sports, awards, important alliances and many more. Aspirants also need to put more efforts for this section due to low cut offs. In today’s time, magazine, daily National and International newspapers and journals on various topics are the best way to prepare and full your knowledge for the XAT entrance examination. These worldwide current topics boost the confidence of aspirants that helps them in better performance during the examination. Moreover, aspirants could update themselves with a variety of online websites and topics, that these days are the best and instant source of information.

Essay Writing-

This part checks the writing ability of students that mainly consist of idioms based topics with various philosophical hints. The essay writing is the assessment of student’s thoughts, with logical arguments (favours or oppose) and basic knowledge related to the topic. Therefore, we advise the aspirants to read and assess the editorials sections of leading national newspapers along with an online assessment for their written format and content patterns.

Further Tips for improvements are explained below-

Focused approach -

Students must focus on decision making and essay writing parts because they checks their general ability for situation handling and their basic knowledge for writing. Thus, the concepts must be strong enough to solve any situation that could only come by solving various previous year questions and making right approach for time-bound correctness.

Mock tests -

The XAT mock tests are available online on various sites and those mock tests are prepared by previous XAT toppers of successors for the further help of XAT persuading students that are easily understood by the students and a special attention to these mock tests during the preparation of XAT examination boost the moral support of students.

Negative Marking-

Ambitious aspirants for this XAT examination should take care for the negative marking. The negative marking means 0.25 marks will be deducted for every wrong answer. Therefore, aspirants should attempt the well prepared questions only. Aspirants could not take it lightly. Therefore, there is no need of any guess for the answers.

Revision for success-

Revision plays the most important while preparing XAT and other examinations. Revision is a vital part that gives extra confidence during preparation and final examination. As much is the revision, more are the chances to clear various concepts regarding various subjects and reading topics.

 We wish you all the “Best of Luck” for your XAT entrance Examination and hope you found all the required information on the preparation of XAT Entrance Examination and we welcome your all queries, suggestions, complaints or question and please mention them in the comment section and we will try to resolve them to make you aware of all the queries. To keep yourself updated, check more articles on our website.